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The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular
culture—it has appeared in works ranging from the Broadway play
“Breaking the Code” to the comic strip “Robotman.” The writings
collected by Stuart Shieber for this book examine the profound
philosophical issues surrounding the Turing Test as a criterion for
intelligence. Alan Turing’s idea, originally expressed in a
1950 paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and
published in the journal Mind, proposed an
“indistinguishability test” that compared artifact and
person. Following Descartes’ dictum that it is the ability to
speak that distinguishes human from beast, Turing proposed to test
whether machine and person were indistinguishable in regard to
verbal ability. He was not, as is often assumed, answering the
question “Can machines think?” but proposing a more concrete way to
ask it. Turing’s proposed thought experiment encapsulates the
issues that the writings in The Turing Test define and
discuss.

The first section of the book contains writings by
philosophical precursors, including Descartes, who first proposed
the idea of indistinguishability tests. The second section contains
all of Turing’s writings on the Turing test, including not
only the Mind paper but also less familiar ephemeral
material. The final section opens with responses to Turing’s
paper published in Mind soon after the paper first
appeared. The bulk of this section, however, consists of papers from
a broad spectrum of scholars in the field that directly address the
issue of the Turing test as a test for intelligence. Contributors
include John R. Searle, Ned Block, Daniel C. Dennett, and Noam
Chomsky (in a previously unpublished paper). Each chapter is
introduced by background material that can also be read as a
self-contained essay on the Turing Test.

“This eagerly-awaited anthology, while surely not the last word on the
Turing Test, equally surely deserves to become the principal source of
information on the Test. It not only includes Turing’s classic paper,
but a fine selection of the main replies to date, all tied together by
an engaging and penetrating essay by the editor. Stuart M. Shieber’s
name is well known to computational linguists for his research and to
computer scientists more generally.... With this collection, I expect
it to become equally well known to philosophers.

“This volume compiles all of the historically important papers
surrounding the Turing Test. Like the essay that it celebrates, it is
destined to become a classic.”